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Inhibitory Conditioning Paper

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Introduction
Inhibitory conditioning involves the use of a conditioned inhibitor; ‘a stimulus which controls a behavioural tendency which is directly opposite to a conditioned exciter based on the same US’ (Rescorla 1969a) It aims to prevent the occurrence of the conditioned response (CR) or reduce its size or strength. This can be achieved by presenting two stimuli simultaneously, one of which should enable the subject to elicit the CR, and one of which should be a conditioned inhibitor. Once this has been fulfilled, it is important to provide evidence for its occurrence. There are two experimental procedures that may be carried out to test whether inhibitory conditioning has occurred in the subject. They are known as the Summation and Retardation …show more content…
This is known as a compound CS (Mazur, 2013.) This produces a contradictory state in the subject, because one stimulus would like to excite; produce the CR, and the other would like to inhibit the presentation of the CR. It follows that, if the CS- is truly inhibitory the CR, which will be elicited in the subject because of the presence of the CS+, and the motivational forces it holds, should be of a lesser strength, or smaller than the CR in phase 1. This is due to the fact that there will be a smaller excitatory value in phase 2 than in phase 1. This can be demonstrated using hypothetical values for the two stimuli; CS+ = 10 and CS- = –2. In the first trial of phase 1, our excitatory value will be 10 because only the CS+ is presented, however, in phase 2, we must add the two values together; [10 + (–2) = 8] because the two stimuli are presented in succession. As a result, we gain an excitatory value of 8 for phase 2, which means that the strength of the CR will be weaker in phase 2 than in phase 1. This can provide empirical evidence for the presence of inhibitory conditioning because the specific behaviour of the CR can be observed by the experimenter, and any changes to the CR (change in size or strength) can be detected and …show more content…
The observation technique will be used because it is necessary to detect any changes in the CR that may occur as a result of inhibitory conditioning; for example, a change is volume of saliva produced by the subject. It is important to provide empirical evidence because it enables the researchers to show that the theory in question is a valid explanation of certain phenomena. Without empirical evidence, it is hard for researchers to build upon, and improve previous theories and explanations, because there is no evidence to suggest that what they are claiming is correct. (Explorable.com,

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